Week 11

The semester is almost over! Our last assignment is due next week and we only have 1 more full week of class left. It's amazing how fast time flies when every week is so busy with assignments, quizzes and tests, and lots of studying. The second semester will probably fly by just as quickly, and then I'll already be done half of my undergraduate education. I still feel like I just started university last month.

This week's quiz was about determining FSAs given a language. I find this is a very systematic approach, which is nice because the method to solving the problem is the same for every problem. These kinds of problems can become tedious and repetitive, but they are also fairly easy.

We learned regular expressions and NFSAs this week. Regular expressions, which conveniently we are also studying in CSC207 at the moment, are a way to represent languages and the strings that are accepted by a language. NFSAs are similar to FSAs except that they are non-deterministic. The previous FSAs that we looked at were DFSAs, which are deterministic finite state automatons, where each state can only have 2 transitions for binary strings; the transition of a single digit 1, and a single digit 0. NFSAs differ in the sense that every state can have multiple transitions; it can have multiple transitions for the digit 1, multiple transitions for the digit 0, and even a transition for the empty string ε. So far, I find these concepts fairly easy to understand, and it really helps that we learned regular expressions in CSC207 recently. 

Also, regarding the problem solving question, we are required to use G. Polya's approach to sovling the problem. I know that some students have written algorithms or programs to help them solve the problem, but I think that this problem can be solved without them, and that is the approach I will take.